Years of Intense Activity

At the end of 1972, 26 months since NASA's
first visit to Moscow to discuss cooperation and six months since the
Summit officially created ASTP, Lunney could reflect upon the
project's accomplishments with a positive frame of mind. A mission
had been defined. Hardware design and development were well along.
And Working Group activities during the thirty months that remained
until launch would follow a pattern established during 1970-1972 and
the schedule negotiated by Bushuyev and Lunney. More than anyone
else, Lunney was responsible for maintaining the pace of
[217] the joint effort. From his office on the seventh
floor of the Program Management Building at MSC, he had to exercise
considerable diplomatic and managerial skill to keep his NASA,
contractor, and Soviet teammates moving along to the July 1975
deadline. After the Apollo
17 flight, Lunney was given a more
direct line of authority for reaching that goal.

The sixth and final lunar landing,
successfully completed by the Apollo crew on 19 December 1972, closed
out another chapter in NASA manned space flight operations. With the
return of 17's Eugene A. Cernan, Ronald E. Evans, and Harrison H.
Schmitt, OMSF reorganized in preparation for Skylab and ASTP. Dale
Myers announced in January 1973 that Rocco Petrone would be leaving
the Apollo Program Office to become the Director of the Marshall
Space Flight Center. Petrone was replaced by Chester M. Lee, who
moved up from Apollo Mission Director. At Houston, Lunney succeeded
Owen Morris as Manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office, which
in addition to ASTP had the responsibility for managing the command
and service module aspects of Skylab, scheduled to be visited for the
first time on 25 May 1973. Chet Lee and Glynn Lunney now directed the
team that would carry the Apollo half of ASTP to
completion.56

Lee and Lunney worked well together. While
Lunney was concerned mainly with the technical aspects of ASTP, Lee
had to worry about technical, political, economic, and public
relations considerations. A 1941 Naval Academy graduate with 24 years
of service, Lee spent the latter part of his naval career working on
the Polaris ballistic missile weapon system. Captain Lee, as he was
called by this NASA colleagues, joined the space agency in 1965 as
Chief of Plans in OMSF's Mission Operations Directorate. Lee and
Lunney shared more than the same managerial problems - both men liked
good cigars and had a reliable sense of humor. But the two men shared
another more important trait - an honest, straightforward manner of
dealing with other people. This characteristic was a very valuable
one for NASA when Captain Lee talked to members of the press and
Congress.

On 2 October 1973, Chet Lee gave a typically
candid briefing to members of the Manned Space Flight Subcommittee of
the House of Representatives Committee on Science and Astronautics.
George Low, Gene Cernan, and Lee had traveled to Capitol Hill that
morning to provide the congressmen in closed session with detailed
background on ASTP and to relieve one particularly nagging concern.
Chairman Olin Teague and Representative Don Fuqua had corresponded
with NASA about the scientific experiments planned for ASTP. As Fuqua
stated their worry, "Our concern has been in the event of any reason
it were not possible to conduct a joint mission with the Soviets NASA
should be prepared to justify the mission on its
merits."57 Clearly, confidence in the Soviets' ability -
politically [218] and technically -
to perform the joint mission was not universal. The Manned Space
Flight Subcommittee wanted some assurance that the scientific program
planned for the Apollo part of the flight would help justify the $250
million total cost.

The timing of Chet Lee's presentation was
significant. On the day before, NASA had celebrated its 15th
anniversary, and Lunney had arrived in Moscow with a 47-member
delegation for a meeting that would culminate in a Mid-Term Review of
ASTP; and on the day of the briefing, tests of the full-scale Soviet
and American docking systems began in Houston. Lee and Cernan were
scheduled to leave for Moscow on 3 October, and Low would follow them
in about ten days' time. Although the congressmen were primarily
interested in the experiments program, Lee gave them a complete
status review so they would have a better context within which to
judge ASTP and the scientific experiments.

He began with a report on the new hardware
designed for the mission. The joint design work on the docking system
was complete, as was the design effort on the docking module.
Modifications to the CSM, which Lee pointed out was left over from
the Apollo program, had been made with the exception of those that
would be required by the experiments hardware and the modified high
gain antenna needed for communicating with the Applications
Technology Satellite (ATS) for improved television, radio, and
scientific telemetry transmissions to the ground. Lee indicated that
ATS-F was very important to the success of the scientific
experiments. Apollo had been able to broadcast picture, voice, and
data from the moon on an almost uninterrupted basis. Skylab was able
to communicate from its 438.2-kilometer orbit for an average of 28
minutes per 93-minute revolution. But ASTP at an altitude of 225
kilometers would have ground station coverage for only about 15
minutes per 88-minute revolution. This limited ability to transmit to
receiving stations would severely hamper the amount of data that
could be gained from some of the experiments. With ATS-F, which was
scheduled for launch in 1974 (at which time it would be called
ATS-6), the communications coverage would be extended to about 49
minutes per orbit.

Reporting on the status of other hardware
elements, Lee told the congressmen that the first of five docking
systems had been completed by Rockwell International* for use in the development tests. While the joint
dynamic tests were scheduled for mid-November, the first round of
docking seal tests had been completed and the results reviewed in
Moscow at the end of June. Though some minor design changes were
being made as a result, confidence in the seal used in the docking
system had increased considerably.

[219]

Apollo communications
links.

Fabrication of the docking module was also on
schedule. He pointed out that this was largely because of the
decision to build the life support system and electrical control
equipment into a panel that could be constructed separately and then
installed into the spacecraft. Lee could give a very favorable
hardware status report.

Lee was equally optimistic when he talked
about operational planning. The "Joint Crew Activities Plan," which
presented the details of the crew actions during the flight, had
reached the point where for a first launch opportunity it could be
used that very day. The experiments would have to be worked into it,
but basically the activities plan was ready to go, Lee said.

An early completion date for the Crew
Activities Plan had been set because "we recognized that with the
language difficulties and numerous joint activities planned we needed
an early start. . . ."58

Representative Bill Gunter questioned Lee's
optimism. Lee responded by saying, "we are on schedule and . . . we
are satisfied with [our] progress, but we do have some qualms." When
asked how one could be on schedule and still be experiencing delays,
George Low explained:

The hardware is on schedule. The
paper work is flowing a little more slowly than we like to see. This
has not yet hurt us; the project [director's] concern is that as we
get closer to the launch, there won't be this kind of luxury of time.
We have to work things out now. The paper, too, will flow
faster.59

[220] The Soviets had
been slow in providing some essential documents the two sides had
agreed to prepare and exchange. They had never refused to provide
information; they were just slow. For example, at Moscow in June at
the very last minute, the Soviets presented a Working Group 4 report
that was to have been delivered 13 months earlier, expecting the
Americans to sign it.** They would not.60 To Low, Lee, and Lunney, it appeared to be partly a
problem generated by Professor Bushuyev's lack of freedom to make
decisions on the spot. Whether in Moscow or Houston, the Professor
had to refer to his superiors before he could provide many kinds of
information. Lee had reported to Fletcher and Low:

Professor Bushuyev frankly admits
that because of the Soviet internal system he does have a problem in
meeting commitments on documentation and providing replies to
specific questions and requests for amplifying information, but that
he does not have this problem to the same degree with
hardware.61

At other times, the Soviets just did not
provide in their documents the detail necessary to satisfy NASA. When
the specialists from Houston explained why they needed specific
points of information, the Soviets provided the additional data, but
seldom did they give all the information the first time. Many
Americans were frustrated by this tooth-pulling contest.

The Soyuz
11 was a good example of this problem.
To get a better understanding of the failure that led to the tragedy,
Glynn Lunney had asked Bushuyev about the technical details of the
accident several times, and still he had not received a clear
explanation. He had pressed the point in Houston during the March
1973 talks, and Dave Scott had raised the issue again for Lunney at
the June meetings in Moscow.62 When Lee and Lunney raised the topic a third time in
Houston during July, the Professor told them that he had already
explained in March the nature of the failure and the corrective
actions taken to assure that it would not be repeated. Lunney firmly
explained to Bushuyev that more details were required to satisfy
safety and reliability requirements for the joint mission and to
assure both supporters and critics of ASTP that the American crew
would not be in danger when Apollo docked with Soyuz.

Chet Lee had reported that "from his
information it was difficult to reconstruct the failure and [the
Soviet explanation] provided little on the corrective action."
Therefore, Lunney requested a fuller and more comprehensible
explanation. Bushuyev was very hesitant to promise this, and
according to Lee he "appeared to stall by stating the Soviets should
then get copies of the Apollo failure reports." After Lunney and Lee
showed [221] Bushuyev a copy of
a message from Keldysh acknowledging receipt of the Apollo 13 accident
report, the Professor promised to work on this request.
Significantly, he would not agree to put this matter into the formal
minutes of the meeting, but he did assent to its being included in a
letter Lunney planned to write to him.63

Captain Lee, with Lunney's support, had
recommended to the Administrator that a Mid-Term Review might be
useful for working out some of these problems:

Glynn Lunney and I have discussed
this at some length. We agree that perhaps a meeting between Mr.
Myers and Academician Petrov or Dr. Low and Academician Keldysh under
the category of a "Review of the Status and Report on ASTP" might be
most helpful in avoiding future problems and delays in the Working
Groups' progress, particularly as we move into the more specific
plans for the mission. 64

Lee was convinced of the genuine desire on the
Soviets' part to make the mission a success. He was also impressed by
the rapport that had developed between the Americans and their Soviet
colleagues and "in particular, the frankness, confidence and personal
working relationships between" Lunney and Bushuyev. Still, he
believed that NASA should continue

to carefully, but frankly, pursue
answers, information and agreements on issues that may be touchy but
are related to the mission. In this manner, we will not only provide
greater confidence of ASTP success, but we can also gradually
eliminate some of the time consuming barriers to smooth and
expeditious working relationships with the Soviets in space
cooperative efforts.65

In his testimony before the Manned Space
Flight Subcommittee, Low said that NASA's desire to build a solid
basis for present and future cooperation was "one of the reasons for
my going over there in two weeks for this Mid Term Review." He also
stressed to his audience on 2 October that while Lee and Lunney were
probably getting less cooperation than they would have liked, "from
the management point of view we are getting far more than we expected
to." Despite the delays, the Soviets had met every obligation they
had agreed to in April 1972.66 Still, the concern over the Soviets' possibly
defaulting or failing to fly was the reason Low, Lee, and Cernan were
giving their briefing to Representative Teague and his associates.
Chet Lee turned to a discussion of the proposed package of ASTP
experiments.

Lee's presentation and the committee members'
comments that followed it dealt less with the actual experiments
themselves than with the merits of spending $250 million to fly $10
million worth of experiments in the event of the Soviets' failure to
rendezvous with Apollo. [222] Once Lee had stated
that there had been 146 responses to the request for experiment
proposals and that a large number of excellent candidate topics had
been selected for further evaluation, the conversation turned to
possible means of adding to Apollo's scientific payload. Captain Lee
saw three possible ways of increasing the scientific examinations of
a unilateral mission - load the backup docking module with additional
experiments, create a scientific instrument module bay in the prime
CSM, or revisit Skylab, which would have been in unmanned orbit for
nearly a year and a half. In addition to the unfavorable impact on
the launch timetable, all of these alternative plans would have been
expensive and probably caused the project to run over its $250
million budget. Each alternative would involve extra engineering and
careful balancing of payload weight and launch vehicle
capacity.

George Low looked at the entire project from a
political perspective. NASA had sought authorization to conduct a
rendezvous and docking mission with a Soviet spacecraft for the
purpose of developing a common system for working together in space.
At the same time, NASA had pointed out that whatever flies in space
should get maximum return for the investment. That is why the agency
set aside $10 million for scientific studies. Low continued:

We have discussed it with the
Congress since then on the basis that . . . for any less we could not
do a decent experiment package. . . . That is how the $10 million
were arrived at. You asked the question, what would we do if the
Russians for some reason would not fly with us, political, technical
or otherwise, and would the mission in itself with the $10 million
worth of experiments . . . be worth flying without that rendezvous. I
think that answer would depend very much as to when this would
happen. Were it to happen now when we have spent a substantial sum of
money, which is still a small fraction of the $250 million, we might
well decide and discuss with the committee the possibility of
cancelling it altogether. Because I am not sure whether it is worth
remaining funds to be expended to go up there in 1975 for the $10
million worth of experiments alone without the rendezvous and
docking.67

On the other hand, if the spacecraft were on
the launch pad and ready to go and for some reason the Soviet portion
of the mission were canceled, then NASA would likely want to go ahead
with the flight but only after consulting with and obtaining the
approval of the Congress and the executive branch.

Representative Teague wanted to know if the
American public should be advised ahead of time that NASA had
alternative plans for the mission. Representative John W. Wydler saw
some dangers in such a course of action. "What would our national
reaction be . . . if the Soviet Union were to
[223] announce their alternative plans for the project if
it doesn't come off?" He thought the American public would assume
that the Soviets did not expect the U.S. to fly. "I think that would
be something that could be very easily misunderstood from the point
of view of the other side if you started to plan what you are going
to do if this mission doesn't happen."68 In George Low's position, the most logical course to
follow was to develop contingency plans but to assume that the
Soviets did indeed plan to fly in 1975. None of the alternatives
seemed as desirable as the basic idea of a joint mission.
Essentially, NASA had faith that the Soviets would meet their
commitment. It was a gamble, but the risk seemed to be a reasonable
one.

61. Lee to Fletcher and
Low, memo, "US/ USSR July Working Group Meeting," 25 July 1973.
Lunney had discussed the documentation issue with Bushuyev in several
letters; e.g., Lunney to Lee, memo, "Transmittal of Letter to
Moscow," 7 June 1973, asking transmittal of letter, Lunney to
Bushuyev, 19 June 1973; and memo, Lunney to Lee, "Transmittal of
Letter to Moscow," 24 Aug. 1973, asking transmittal of letter, Lunney
to Bushuyev [n.d.].

62. Interview,
Scott-Ezell, 21 Aug. 1974.

63. Lee to Fletcher and
Low, memo, "US/USSR July Working Group Meeting," 25 July 1973.